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Why 7.1 Surround Sound is Overkill For Most Homes
RX8 writes "Home Theater expert Mark Fleischmann explains why you should not fall for the 7.1 hype and why 5.1 surround sound is adequate for most homes. From the article: 'With the marketing of 6.1 and 7.1 surround, the industry has decisively outwitted itself. It has convinced many consumers to buy new receivers and more speakers. But it has also undermined the 5.1-channel standard, which is more appropriate for the home, slowing the acceptance of surround sound in general.'"
Well, movies, music, such stuff where quality matters, if you're a connesseur you may want 5.1 or even 7.1. But 5.1 may mean difference between being alive and dead, and you NEED it in certain case.
Friend's tale. He's the 1337, I'm just a n00b so it doesn't matter in my case. UT deathmatch. He bought his new 5.1 and configured it correctly. Some tunnel deep underground. And then he hears, left-behind, the sound of a Ripper, that deadly spinning disk that upon hitting your neck cuts your head off, granting the opponent an instant frag and counting as headshot. "Duck" and the ripper zooms over his head. Fast turn and a rocket into the enemy's face. One frag less for the opponent, one more for him, one 1337 tale more to tell, one more deathmatch won in total... Thanks to 5.1.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I personally have a decent 5.1 surround system. It's far from the top end of things, but noticeably better than most of the cheap systems you see for sale at Wal-Mart.
From the variety of movies that I've watched on it, my big complaint lies with the audio encoding of the movies themselves rather than with the equipment it's playing on. I have a few hundred DVDs, and there's only a handful of them where it seems that any real effort was put into the channeling of the audio. The Superbit version of the Fifth Element comes to mind as a movie that simply sounds incredible with the surround. Most of the rest of them fall short, even ones with dts.
I have a suspicion that the dts tracks on some of them were just copies of the Dolby (or even Stereo) tracks that had just been resampled at a higher bitrate. It would be like using a casette to record a song from a radio broadcast and then encoding it into a 128kHz mp3. It's still not going to sound as good as the original (The original CD... not the radio recording).
Anyway, perhaps I'm wrong but, it seems like the shortcomings in my sound system (and many others as well) is not so much the equipment, but the quality of the media being played. Anyone else seen a difference between DVD distributions of movies? Or perhaps have a preferrence in the companies you buy your DVDs from?
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
This whole "clipping is a fact of life except in expensive systems". No, not so much actually. I'd be really supprised if most good reciever/speaker combos ever clipped. It's not hard to build an amp that has plenty of power for home theatre, espically when you are talking the distances at which the speakers will be placed. Generally people aren't going to be running them at a whole lot more than a couple watts RMS.
The thing is that recievers are all transistor amps, and clipping is really noticable on transistors. Transistors are essentally completely linear up to a point, then they just stop hard and don't put out any more power. It isn't quite as harsh as digital clipping, but close. It's not smooth like tube clipping where the tube slowly enters a non-linear zone.
Also, more channels wouldn't give a reciever any more reason to clip. Each channel is a seperate amp. What matters in regards to clipping is the amount of power going in to a single channel. If it's more than the channel can handle, you clip, if not, you don't. What's happening on the other channels isn't relivant.
He's also wrong that there's no reason to want more speakers just because there's no seperate encoding for them. If that were the case, why the hell do theatres have more than 5 speakers? Well, because the sound would suck. You have people all spread out, you need surround speakers all along the walls to get a good, diffuse surround field that's pleasant for all of them.
It's actually the same reason behind a centre channel. In theory on a good setup, such a thing sould be unnecessary. Indeed you find this is the case, if you have two quality speakers that are focused on a listener, they can generate a perfectly centred sound by playing in unison. No need for a speaker there. However, that relies on a very small sweet spot. If people are spread out, the illusion breaks. So, we just put a speaker in the dead centre, and send the sound there. It makes the sound seem to come from the middle of the screen, regardless of your angle to it.
The real reason not to get 7.1 in most cases is you are wasting money because your listening area is too small to really benefit from more speakers. However, it's not going to make your reciever clip or anything, unless you've got a seriously screwed up reciever.
This demo of 3D sound out of two speakers still blows me away: http://www.holophonic.ch/archivio/testaudio/Cereni %20-%20Holophonic.mp3
---- scrm